Tag: tab

I’m still happily using a Raspberry Pi 2B 3 as a lightweight desktop machine. It’s not my main computer, but it’s pleasantly capable. Set up with a couple of paged desktops (or virtual desktops, as we used to call ’em), I can get a bunch of things done with it.

One feature that really irked me, though, was the way that window switching worked. Or, for greater clarity, didn’t work. Openbox, the standard window manager in Raspbian, didn’t allow you to switch to windows on another desktop with Alt+Tab. As I have a smallish screen, I typically have very few windows per desktop, so I want that ability to move from task to task.

This, however, can be fixed. In your ~/.config/openbox/lxde-pi-rc.xml file, change the keybinding sections for Alt+Tab and Alt-Shift+Tab from:

Finding a source of “Unlimited free energy” would be the most unimaginably heinous crime possible against humanity. For it would inevitably turn the planet into a cinder. Hastening an isoentropic heat death. If you find a free energy source, you damn well better find a new free energy sink as well. Even then, the relative flux rates will still nail you.

I fear my plan to have the T21 as a home server has gone wrong. Looks like the mini-PCI network card has blown, leaving it invisible to the network. Since the screen backlight is dead, I can read no diagnostics … ;-(

Update: Aha! The backlight gods must’ve heard me, for the T21 actually graced me with a visible screen for a few hours. It was down to:

A bad line in my fstab which was trying to mount an unattached USB drive. This drops OpenBSD into single-user mode.

no dhclient configuration, so the machine would not automatically appear on the network. Since I swapped out the purportedly faulty mini-PCI network card for a spare (what?! you mean you don’t have spare mini-PCI network cards about the house? Tsk.) I had to tell the system that this was the new card to get a DHCP address.

So all works now, and I’m happy. Now to attack the LaserJet 4 duplexer, and swap it onto my refurbed printer …

The above image is copyrighted, trademarked, service-marked and intellectually-propertized 15-ways-to-Sunday by Hasbro. I hereby acknowledge that I’m a very naughty person to have nicked it for my website, and have felt good and contrite for at least the last 5 (five) seconds. But then, since Hasbro own the rights to my earliest published writings (long story: they bought Database Publications, for whom I used to write) and are sitting on the goldmine that is the film rights to Stardodger (my first, and only, game), I think they’ve done okay from me.

Ah, New Tab Homepage brings happiness to this Firefox user. I rather got to like the lightweight Epiphany browser during my mini-itx odyssey. When you opened a new browser tab in Epiphany, it loaded your home page. The supposedly more advance Firefox never did this.

New Tab Homepage fixes this, and doesn’t add any other tab-related cruft that I couldn’t use.

My ThinkPad T21 is dying. Well, its processor and interfaces are fine, but its backlight is erratic, the battery lasts about 20 minutes, and the case is badly cracked. Because it takes so long for the screen to come on, it’s almost no use as a portable computer.

It’s a shame; it has been a nice machine. I’d prefer not to have to buy a new machine — it’s a toss-up between another used ThinkPad, or a new iBook — but this gets me very frustrated. Catherine has been complaining about how tetchy I am about it.

I’ve probably been very bad at responding to e-mail over the last few weeks because of this. Apologies.

Firefox‘s tabbed browsing really irks me sometimes. I was most of the way through composing a pithy (no, I don’t have a lisp) entry, when I try to close an unwanted tab with the [X] icon. Kaboom! My entry’s gone. Seems I closed the wrong tab.